JAY WILLIAMS WAS HAPPY TO LEAVE arrangements to Father Carmody, who had the body brought back to Notre Dame, made arrangements with Hickey the undertaker, and secured a plot in Cedar Grove Cemetery on what had been the sixteenth fairway when Dave Williams had played the course as a student. Then he made arrangements with Father Rocca, rector of Sacred Heart Basilica, for the funeral.
“You'll be saying the Mass, Father?” Father Rocca asked.
“Yes, Peter.” He waited, tense, but that was all. He had been afraid the rector might volunteer to assist. He might have wanted to concelebrate.
“I'll be in the sanctuary.”
“Thank God,” he said fervently.
That done, he settled down to call the names on the little list he had made.
“Casey Winthrop called me, Father,” Beth said when he got through to her. “Of course I'm coming.”
“Bring Quinn.”
“Father, he's disappeared.”
“Not again!”
“Casey saw him in Florida.”
“I hope Casey can come.”
“He's just become a father.”
Pray hold me excused? No, Casey said he had expected the call ever since leaving Gethsemani.
“I'll want to hear all about your visit there,” Father Carmody told him. So would Phil Knight.
“What's to tell? I want my son baptized at Notre Dame.”
“If you're asking me to do it, the answer is yes.”
“Great.”
He had had few chances for pastoral work over the years, a wedding now and again, lately funerals, hearing confessions in Sacred Heart. How long had it been since he had baptized a baby?
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Father Carmody called the abbot to tell him that he hoped Father Joachim could come to the funeral. The abbot said it had been almost like losing one of his monks when David Williams died in the infirmary.
“He will be buried here, of course,” Carmody said.
“Here?”
“At Notre Dame.”
He was half afraid the abbot would suggest burying David Williams in with a bunch of monks. Of course, that was unlikely. How many nonmembers of the Congregation had been buried in their community cemetery? Not that there were a lot of requests.
“You want Joachim to say the Mass?” the abbot asked.
Father Carmody had not expected this, but what else would the abbot think? Otherwise attending the funeral might have seemed to him a mere pleasure trip. He shut his eyes and said, “We'll concelebrate.”
It was beginning to look like a very small funeral. Would there
be enough of David's old classmates to act as pallbearers? Next was Wheeling, current president of the class of 1989. He would spread the word.
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Mame Childers reacted like Mame Childers. “Oh my God. Father, I had a premonition. I've often had them in the past. I knew it was too good to last. Nothing works out for me.”
Well, grief is often self-referential.
“Has Jay been told, Father? His son?”
“You know him?”
“Of course I know him. We've become quite friends. It seemed the prudent thing to do.”
Father Carmody forbore asking her how her monsignor was doing. Let her cherish the thought that she and David Williams would have married. The old priest had not had an opportunity to discuss Mame's letter from Monsignor Sparrow with Dave.
The reminder of the son diverted him to Roger Knight.
Phil answered. “He's sleeping, Father. He's all tuckered out.”
“Sounds like a failed automobile.”
A long pause. Phil would think he was getting as bad as Roger.
“Have him call me, will you, Phil?”
“Are you watching the game?”
“With the sound off.” The picture, too. What game was Phil referring to? The man was such a sports nut it might have been lacrosse.
Father Carmody realized that he was enjoying being in charge, arranging things. Some of the old zest came back. He still had a few miles in him. Then he thought of the few miles that separated Holy
Cross House from the community cemetery. How long would it be before he was taken there from his own funeral Mass and interred with his brothers in religion, the strains of the
Salve Regina
sweetening the winter air? Winter? Make it summer. The summer after next. Or later. He went back to his list.
EMIL CHADWICK WAS DOZING OVER
The Devil's Dictionary
in his office in Brownson Hall; that is, the book was open on his lap, his eyes were closed, and he was aware of a familiar sound, the tolling of the bells of nearby Sacred Heart Basilica. He was almost as close to them as Quasimodo, but it was not only defective hearing that now made their sound more faint.
There had been a time in his life, say from around fifty to seventy-five, when the solemn tolling of those bells marked another entry in his personal necrology, another colleague gone, or another faculty spouse. Of course he had gone to such funeral Masses and as often as not on to the cemetery for the burial. The ultimate test of collegiality. He had buried friends and enemies alike. The bells no longer tolled for him. He was the sole survivor of those who had been on the faculty in his golden years. Unsurprisingly, given recent events, he remembered the tolling of those bells when there had been a memorial service for the supposedly late Timothy Quinn. Perhaps, like Huckleberry, young Quinn had taken some mordant pleasure, if only belated, in the thought of his own funeral. Chadwick stirred. There were times when he felt that his own funeral had already occurred. He opened his eyes and glanced at the book on his lap, only the top third of which was visible over the arc of his stomach.
FUNERAL, n.
A pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears.
Not bad. Not terribly good either. Well, that was true of most of Ambrose Bierce's definitions. Once Chadwick had found that gloomy humor witty. Later, the entries came to seem forced. They were certainly uneven in quality.
Bierce had been raised in Indiana, just down the road from South Bend. Off to the Civil War, into journalism, to San Francisco, then Washington, and finally the mysterious disappearance in Mexico. There were precedents for Timothy Quinn. Actually, he was more like B. Traven than Bierce. Traven had survived his disappearance. Mexico again. What intrigued Chadwick was learning that Quinn had made his way back to the campus after discharge from the army and worked on the grounds crew.
“He said he operated a mower on the golf course,” Roger Knight had said.
“Burke.”
Roger didn't understand.
“The old golf course. Only half of it is left. I stopped golfing when they gobbled up the back nine for new buildings.”
“You golfed?”
“Often, but not well. The risibly cheap season ticket was one of the few faculty perks in those days. In August, before they installed the sprinkling system, a topped ball could roll three hundred yards on the khaki fairways.” Chadwick smiled into the past.
“He is an odd fellow, Emil.”
Quinn. “Well, after all those years of being dead.”
Roger had of course recounted to him his visit to Minneapolis to see Beth Hanrahan and the surprising discovery of Quinn as a volunteer in her center for wandering homeless souls. “He works in the kitchen. He makes the soup.”
“Was he a cook in the army?”
“Just what I asked him. He said he wasn't that bad.”
Chadwick smiled.
“I was in the navy, you know, Emil. The food wasn't bad at all. At any rate, I thrived on it. You might say that it contributed to my discharge.”
Roger had a semidefensive habit of alluding to his enormous weight. He asked if Chadwick had read the stories in the student papers.
“Certainly not.”
“There was going to be a revival of a play by Patrick Pelligrino. They intended to invite that group of students from the Class of 1989 to attend. The original cast. Of course, Brother Joachim could not have come.”
“Meaning he wouldn't want to. Trappists can do such things nowadays. Don't forget that Joachim requested and was given permission to spend some time in the hermitage.”
“The scene of the crime.”
“It's where Thomas Merton hung out. To be alone. Merton didn't like community life.”
Chadwick had visited the place with Maurice, Chrysologus, his son: a kind of camp, deep in the woods, a bedroom, an oratory, a kitchen, and a front porch where one had a wonderful view down a valley to some hills. He thought of his little house in Holy Cross Village. “We all end up monks of a sort.”
“Beth Hanrahan has promised to come to the funeral.”
“I would like to see her again.”
“Again?”
“She came to me for directed readings.” He laid his head on the back of his chair, thinking. “Hawthorne. We read Hawthorne.” A long silence. “The thing that interested her most was the fact that Hawthorne's daughter became a Dominican nun.”
Roger rose to go, asking if Emil would care for a cup of coffee.
“It would keep me awake.”
The door closed. Now Emil turned the pages of his book.
CONVENT, n.
A place of retirement for women who wish for leisure to meditate upon the vice of idleness.
ROGER DID NOT HAVE MUCH TO SAY when Phil ticked off the names of those he considered suspects in the murder of David Williams. Phil expected a protest when he led off with Brother Joachim, but Roger just worked his lips in and out, breathing through his nose.
“Then there's Jay Williams.”
“His son?”
Phil reminded him of what the guest master had said about the Notre Dame student who had visited Gethsemani on the day Williams was attack.
“That's pretty far-fetched, Phil. His own father?”
“It bears looking into. You're the one who told me what his girlfriend said.”
Amanda Zikowski had indeed told Roger that she was worried about Jay. “He's afraid his father is going to get married again.”
“That's not against the law, Amanda.”
“You have to understand Jay's feeling for his mother. She's been gone years, yet he talks about her as if she's in the next room. He thinks it would be a betrayal.”
“Have you made up with him?”
She smiled. “A cosmetic truce. He thinks because his father was a student actor it's in the genes.”
Roger remembered that Jay had once asked himâseriously? as
part of his pranks?âif he could hire the Knight brothers to investigate his father. Concern with how the financial mess was affecting his father had been the reason given, but Amanda's remark made him wonder. If Jay had told Phil he wanted to know if his father had a girlfriend, he would have been out of luck. Phil never took divorce cases.
Phil had made a flying trip to New York and had not learned much. He had heard about Dave's liaison with Mame, but Father Carmody had assured him there was nothing to it.
Apparently, however, Jay had hired someone else. Phil had run into Ziggy Cobalt in Leahy's. Ziggy was a private eye, his preferred self-description, and with lenses as thick as his, his eyes did seem to be enjoying their privacy.
“Knight!” Ziggy said, looking over both shoulders first.
“What brings you here?”
Ziggy winked in reply. “Now, now, you know that's not an appropriate question.”
Later Phil asked Murph if Ziggy had talked with him.
“He's talked with everybody. He says he's a private eye.”
“Then he must be out on parole.”
“You know him?”
“I did. Before his conviction. What's he looking for?”
“You got me.”
“He's been in prison?”
“I'm kidding. Ziggy has no convictions.”
Phil had tailed Ziggy to the residence in which Jay Williams lived. Had Ziggy told Jay about Mame? Father Carmody might dismiss it, but Phil thought otherwise.
Phil went on with his list. “Then there is Timothy Quinn.”
Roger rotated his wheeled chair. “That would seem more likely,
but you would have to place him at the monastery at the time.” He thought of the name John Donne entered in the guesthouse registry and of Joachim's remark.
Phil didn't think a lot of the list himself, but what else did he have? The biggest problem was jurisdictionâif there was even a charge. There was a sheriff in the county in which Gethsemani was located, a man named Casper, whom Phil had looked up before they headed back to Notre Dame. Casper was what Roger would call taciturn. When he did speak it was emphatically.
“I don't want to tangle with those monks.”
“Someone has been murdered, Sheriff.”
“Is that right? No one ever told me about it. Where you from, son?”
Casper might have been a month or two older than Phil. Was this a sense of turf, or an exaggerated respect for the separation of church and state?
“I work out of New York. I'm living at Notre Dame now.”
“Notre Dame!”
“It's a university in Indiana.”
“I know what it is. LSU cleaned their clock last year.” Casper's narrow eyes grew narrower. “You working for those monks?”
Phil gave up. Apparently the abbot had seen no need to call the sheriff because David Williams had died in the monastery infirmary. Wise as a serpent or simple as a dove? Maybe Casper wouldn't have taken his call. If he ever did find out who had dealt the ultimately mortal blow to David Williams, Phil wondered, where would he go with the information?
Roger said, “Well, Phil, they should all be here for the funeral.”
“Is Quinn coming?”
“No one can find him to tell him what has happened.”
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Father Carmody was obviously of two minds. Phil sat with him in his room, watching vagrant snowflakes float by the window. Winter was on its way, and when winter came to Indiana it was, as Roger said, unequivocal winter. Father Carmody had enlisted Phil's help to find out what had happened to David Williams in the hermitage at Gethsemani, so of course all he had to do was fire him if he wanted to. There had been little publicity about the murder, indeed no charge of murder, and Father Carmody liked that fine. The less danger of a blemish on the reputation of Notre Dame, the better. Who knew what Phil might turn up that would reflect adversely on Notre Dame? Or give her enemies cause for gossip?
“There's no doubt that his death was due to that blow on the head?” Father Carmody asked this as he expelled cigarette smoke. He might have wanted to see what it would sound like if spoken aloud. Phil said nothing to this, but when he described his conversation with Sheriff Casper, the old priest's integrity was put to a real test.
“There's no official acknowledgment of murder?”
“Casper knows nothing about it.”
“So what are we investigating?”
“The murder of David Williams.”
Phil could see how much Carmody would like to say,
Let sleeping dogs lie. Let Dave Williams rest in peace. If the sheriff down there doesn't care, why should we?
Care legally, that is. Of course he couldn't bring himself to say that.
There had been an autopsy when the body arrived in South Bend, but the blow on the head from which Dave had died might
have been caused by an accident. The wound was included in the autopsy and the body turned over to Hickey.
“Maybe you'll never find out who did it, Phil.”
“That's more than possible.”
This cheered Carmody up. It made Phil all the more eager to find who had brought that chunk of firewood down on David Williams's head. Even if Carmody had told him to forget it, he would have gone on with the investigation.